It's been a long sabbatical, but the past few month I've been getting the urge to post so I'm back. We'll see where this goes and for how long!

I was originally going to talk about one of my favorite vegetables: celery. Yes, you heard that right. I love celery, especially stir-fried celery. And talk about Fuschia Dunlop's newest cookbook Every Grain of Rice. If you're serious about Chinese food, you need this cookbook. In fact, why haven't you already ordered it? If you have her other cookbooks, you'll see a small number of repeated recipes, but they are greatly outnumbered by new ones. It's only January and I'm ready to declare it a top contender for cookbook of the year. There are eleven more months for publishers to come out with something to wow me, and I wish them luck because Dunlop has set a high bar with her third cookbook.

Okay... back to where I was going to go, even if not originally. See, I read this article about quinoa production in South America, and that got me thinking about food choices. I try to buy local and (mostly) in season. With refrigeration and global production and shipping making many seasonal produce items essentially available all year around, our expectations about what we should be able to find and eat year around are greatly changed from a few generations ago. When is that okay and when does it cause problems? I've read about water-guzzling asparagus crops, while making Peruvian farmers better off, are also draining away Peru's aquifers, all so we can have off-season asparagus. What happens when they run out of water for asparagus? What problems do I contribute to when I seek out imported Asian ingredients so I can cook Chinese and Thai dishes, my preferred cuisines at home.

I love buying local. I support local farmers and local non-chain stores (and, I admit, I go to a chain or two for some items I can't get elsewhere). And not only do I want to support local farmers, but I also want to reduce the number of miles my food has traveled. But there are items I can't get locally, and I'm not an extreme locavore. So while things aren't as dire as the Guardian article makes it out to
be, at least for quinoa, I am still thinking about what this means for my own food choices.

Last Wednesday I dashed to the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market on my lunch hour. I was on a quest for cherries, so I rushed by a vendor who was calling out to shoppers about his beautiful lettuce. A little while later, after getting lunch at Monahan's, I was feeling more leisurely and this time I stopped.

And I was glad I did.

Salomon Jost of Salomon Gardens is selling what has to be the absolutely freshest all-organic lettuce at the market. When harvesting, he undercuts the roots, washes off the soil, and stores the lettuce in a cooler under high humidity. At the market, he sets out the beautiful full heads of lettuce in trays of ice water. Even after hours of sitting outside in the heat, his lettuce is crisp and alive. So alive, in fact, that I wanted to take my head of lettuce home and plant it in my garden. (The lettuce, harvested at its peak, would probably soon bolt in my garden, which would, of course, rather defeat the purpose.)

He has a total of fourteen varieties, including green butter head, red oak leaf, green oak leaf, red romaine, green summer crisp, and red summer crisp. About five were available on the day I stopped by. Prices are based on the size of the lettuce head, ranging from around $2.50 to $4, which I appreciated as I could pick the size that best meets my needs.

Salomon is new to owning his own business, but he isn't new to farming. His agriculture experience goes back to high school and more recently culminated in 2008 with a Masters of Science from the MSU Department of Horticulture, with his research centered around compost. In between high school and graduate school, he worked on a family dairy farm in Wisconsin, a large diversified farm in Germany that did everything from livestock, dairy, and vegetables and grains, a small farm with just 14 hand-milked dairy cows in Switzerland, and a large farm in Brazil producing dairy, medicinal herbs, and vegetables where he oversaw vegetable production for 2.5 years. All were biodynamic farms.

Back in January, Salomon was talking to friend and farmer Jim Koan of the organic Al-Mar Orchard about not having a job since graduating. Jim offered Salomon the use of some hoop houses at Al-Mar Orchard, and Salomon Gardens was born. He is starting with organic leafy greens, but intends to branch out to a full range of vegetables and herbs from beans to zucchini.

He currently sells at the Ann Arbor Farmers' Market on Wednesday, and on Sunday's at the East Lansing Farmers' Market. In the Fall, he will transition to the Saturday markets in Ann Arbor where he hopes to offer winter crops of Swiss chard, spinach, lettuce mix, kale, collards, and squash, but at present he is enjoying the more moderate pace of Wednesdays and the opportunity to get to know his customers.

Of running his own business, Salomon says, "It is very different doing everything than joining an existing
farm organization. I have at least five fires, each with two or three
irons to tend to. With the supportive farming wisdom of Jim and Albert
(Jim's father) Koan I am to keep on task - just enough - without
getting too overwhelmed.

"Market day is just great! I get to meet and talk with
the people who are having a great time with friends, family, and
enjoying the overall experience. It offers me an opportunity to balance
the rest of the week of direct farming. Rather more extroverted, a bit
less physical, but just as fun!"

I'm not very good at remembering anniversaries or birthdays. In fact, I hardly noticed that this past April was Kitchen Chick's 5 year anniversary. Five years! Wow. The last time I spent five years doing
something it was for my undergraduate degree, and I needed that extra year because I changed majors in my four year. I've never even
stayed in the same job for five years, though I think that may happen
with my current one.

A lot can happen in five years. Five years
ago I had never attempted making Ethiopian food. Over the past few years I've posted some of my attempts, though in truth I've never really been 100% happy with the results. I don't even cook those dishes the same way now as I wrote about them then.

But with thanks to the internet, I've been able to obtain previously-hard-to-find Ethiopian ingredients that really make a difference in the flavor. (If you don't have a local source, I've ordered from Ethiopian Spices, but there are two more sources: Habesh Foods and Brundo.)
And with additional thanks to the internet, I can compare the recipes in various books
against the increasing number of recipes posted online. As a result, I've been able to modify and tweak what I cook to taste more and more like what I've had at the most authentic restaurants I've eaten at around the country. I've become sufficient efficient that I can bang out three dishes and injera in about an hour fifteen. This is a big improvement from the 2.5 hour marathons of past times. In fact, I've reached the point where sometimes I like my version of a dish better than what I've had at restaurants.

Whoa.

And
still, sometimes a new-to-me device, technique, or ingredient comes along that
revolutionizes my cooking. Last summer I had the great fortune to stumble upon an Ethiopian
grocery/restaurant in the Columbus Ohio area run by a very nice couple.
It was a great fortune not only because I was able to buy a 40lb bag of
teff, but also because the wife of the couple took me back into her
kitchen and showed me how to make a certain beef dish. Wow! I wish I
could say more, but I was sworn to secrecy. No kidding. Ironically,
while she was swearing me to secrecy, her husband was telling Joe that
he didn't understand why cooking food should be such a secret.

But along with the 40lb bag of teff and a pound of totally rockin' homemade shiro mix, they also sold me the below Heritage Grill,
which she uses for making injera. She had four grills lined up so she
could make large batches of injera, which she sold in their store. This
grill has completely reworked my process flow for cooking Ethiopian
food. Now I have a sufficiently large and evenly hot surface
which cooks up nice wide injera quickly, and it frees up burners on my
stove. (I set it to 350 to 400 F, depending on how fast I want to cook. After spreading the batter on the grill, cover it with the lid
for a short bit while cooking to trap the heat which helps the the top set.)

I think this grill is the primary reason I've managed to cut my cooking time so much, though I've certainly improved my prep work flow as well. My stove top can now be complete devoted to my dishes, and I can get a lot more going on in parallel.

I hope you'll forgive me if I don't post more recipes. I'm still really adjusting how I make the dishes and don't feel ready to post, but there are a multitude online resources these days. Here are a few to check out:

In March we went to England to visit friends and family. And eat a lot of good food, because Britain is actually full of really good food.

Mid-March in England is a lot like Mid-April in Michigan. The grass is green, the daffodils are in full bloom, the trees are just starting to leaf out, and the temperatures are mild. It should also be raining constantly, but in our typical traveling luck we had ten straight days of sunny weather. In England, can you believe? (Okay, we had two cloudy afternoons.)

We arrived on a Friday morning and sacked out most of the day, while our friends who were hosting us went off to work.

We entered in though "the back", and were immediately transported to food heaven. We brushed past a restaurant that was serving up paella on their outside seating area — the aroma was intoxicating — and found ourselves in a fabulous chaos of outside stands with foods from around the world. Sausages, sweets, spices. Pasta, paté, preserves. Oh my! I didn't know which way to turn first. The Indian snacks and condiments, the Mexican chiles, the Middle Eastern meze and spices... You can eat your way around the globe at the Borough Market. We spotted many cured meats and cheeses that are either restricted from import to the US or are taxed outrageously.** The only thing that kept me from buying everything in sight was the fact that for one, we'd go broke on our first day in London, and for another, we wouldn't be able to legally bring it back through customs. (Traveling abroad? Learn what's illegal to bring back before you go. The real crime? That it's illegal to bring these things into the States.)

The market was packed. We pushed our way through the crowds and came out into the covered area of the market with more fruit and flower stands, butchers, and baked goods. We're told locals try to shop on Thursdays and Fridays to avoid the heavy tourist crowds.

Eventually we came out to a corner of the market and found ourselves at Brindisa. Our friend Gauri told us that we absolutely had to have one of the Chorizo sandwiches that Brindisa grills up on weekends. We were hungry, but we passed up a lot of fabulous food because we trusted Gauri that it would be worth it.

You order a single or double portion of chorizo, and Brindisa's cooking staff split a roll and add chorizo hot off the grill with some roasted peppers and arugula (aka "rocket" as its known in the UK). And then you eat.

Oh yeah. The wait was worth it. It was pretty much perfect. The sweet pepper was a great foil to the salty and spiced chorizo, and even the rocket added something. The proportions are better if you don't get the double chorizo, but extra chorizo has its own benefits.

You don't have to go Brindisa to enjoy at least a very similar sandwich. Pick up some Spanish chorizo (not Mexican style), available in the cold case at Sparrow Market, some arugula, and preserved roasted red peppers with the skins peeled off (I think Brindisa used Spanish preserved pequillo peppers, which are roasted and then preserved). I don't know what kind of bread they used specifically, but a French baguette, ciabatta, or similar bread ought to do the trick.

Borough Market's art deco main entrance (that we didn't use)

**For example, Jamón ibérico de bellota was only approved for import recently, and has a new 100% import tax for "jamon on the bone" courtesy of an ongoing trade war with the EU because its ban on U.S. beef produced with growth hormones.

Ann Arbor Farmer's Market has always been the place to find (reasonably) locally grown produce and tasty bake goods, but as I passed through the market today I noticed an increasing number of vendors advertising their "local-ness". Along with local baked goods, early season produce, eggs (I saw a lot of egg vendors today!), are a growing number of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). Many are full up by now, but some still have spots available such as "Down on the Farm", which we are considering.

It's "Down on the Farm's" first year as a CSA, and you won't find them on a website because they are an Amish farm. (And I hope they don't mind that I'm writing about them here on the Internets.) They use 100% animal and human labor. Fields are plowed and worked with horses. Down on the Farm calls themselves a "customized CSA" because you can mark those items that you particularly love, and even opt to not receive items that you don't want at all. Members will also have the opportunity to buy beef, chicken, eggs, as well as order extra vegetables for freezing or canning.

They still have shares available for this year's growing season, and the last day to join up is May 15. They deliver shares to the AA Farmer's Market, Ann Arbor West, Ypsilanti Market, and Marshall Market. (And if you work in the 777 building on Eisenhower, they are putting together a special delivery for that building!) Share costs are:

$300 for a "small" share (2 people — Wow! A CSA with a 2 person share!)$525 for a "standard share" (4 people)$675 for a "large share" (8 people - Now, that's the bargain!)

Down on the Farm can be reached by phone and mail, or you can find their stand at the market.

Down on the Farm299910 R Drive S.Homer, MI 49245Phone after 8am: 517-542-2025

The flowers and vegetable seedlings are starting to make their appearance, but Spring Gardening Fever hasn't quite taken over the market yet, making it easy to spot all the delicious food offerings. A complete listing of all the vendors I love buying from would be... long, to say the least, so here are just a few highlight of our visit today.

In the bread department, Joe particularly likes Mill Pond Bakery's dense sprouted grain bread that has a tang like a sour dough, and I'm rather fond the lovely whole wheat/oat-blend-molasses-flavored Pendel Hill Brown bread from Community Farm Kitchen (a part of the Community Farm CSA). Served up with plenty of butter, of course!

Coffee lovers should check out RoosRoast. John Roos sold me my car — complete with a complementary bag of his coffee, and then shortly afterward he quit the rat race and devoted himself 100% to his coffee roasting business. (And he's looking fabulously happy doing it, too!) We don't drink coffee, but we like to keep some in the freezer for friends who do and today we added a bag of his "lobster butter love" coffee to replace the aging bag of (unnamed corporate fancy brand here).

And after seeing and talking about so much great food, we were hungry and ordered up some of Pilar's delicious Salvadorian-style tamales from her traveling tamale cart.

Pilar selling her very popular and delicious tamales, and of course... flowers!

I've been in the clueless department this month, so in case any of you have been as crazy-busy to notice what time of year it is, I offer this Public Service Announcement:

Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, which means it's Paczki Day!

I'll be picking up mine tomorrow from Copernicus, which brings theirs in from Canada. If you're ordering 3 dozen or more, you can call them at 734-222-9633 and they'll have them packed up and ready to go; otherwise, just show up at 617 S. Main St., Ann Arbor.

Amadeus makes their own fabulous paczki, but it may be too late to order from them. They haven't been answering their phone all day today. (They're probaby crazy-busy making those paczki!)

Finally, some people are partial to Dom Bakeries.

Support a local business and make your co-workers happy, too: buy some paczki tomorrow!

Can you believe Easter is just around the corner? You can celebrate Easter in the traditional way with chocolate. Hide a box of Tammy's Chocolates for your friends or family, and watch them tear apart the house trying to be the one to find them. My friend Tammy has been making small production hand-made truffles from high quality ingredients for several years now, and each year has been better than the one before. Every chocolate-loving holiday has a different selection of flavors. This Easter she is offering:

"Turtle" Bunny or Egg (larger than a normal chocolate) filled with salty caramel and toasted pecans and coated in dark chocolate.

Raspberry - dark chocolate and raspberry

Chai Spice - Milk chocolate with a blend of cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger wrapped in a dark chocolate shell.

Lemon-Rosemary - White chocolate and citrus-y lemon with a hint of rosemary.

Kitchen Chick: Tell me a bit how you became a food enthusiast. You know, some people were interested in being a chef since they were little, while others have some transformative event in their lives. What's your story?

Tammy: I don't know that I have a transformative event. I've been interested in cooking and baking for as long as I can remember, and I've forged most of my best friendships around the dinner table. But when I look back at my life, I realize that I've always had an affinity for food-related businesses. When I was a kid, it was sidewalk bake sales. Later, my boyfriend and I made bread and sold it to friends and coworkers - we didn't have a car, and I remember us carrying home 20lb bags of flour on the back of his bicycle! I made apple pies and chocolate cake and sold them to a local restaurant/cafe - I realize now that my markup was ridiculously small and I was barely covering the cost of my materials, but that's what they could afford to pay and I was just so thrilled to have an opportunity to share what I had made. So I guess it's no surprise that my life path has led me back to starting a company where I can share my own creations, and also share my great passion and enthusiasm for all things "foodie."

(More in the extended post, including Tammy's chocolate recommendations!)

Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, or as it's known in Metro-Detroit, Paczki Day! Here are some important last-minute announcements:

Say it rightOur earlier Paczki Day discussion provoked some comments from native speakers about how Americans mispronounce the word. At long last, we now have a recording of a native speaker saying both the singular and the plural. Listen to it here. Yeah, I can see why there's confusion. And no, that nasal vowel sound doesn't exactly exist in English. But now you can at least get closer. And this year you have a couple places to try out your newfound Polish fluency... just remember, "paczki" is plural; if you want just one, it's a "paczek."

Handmade Paczki from AmadeusI am completely, utterly, indescribably happy to say that Amadeus is making paczki this year. Assuming the future will repeat the past, Amadeus's paczki are small flavorful hand-made delights that elevate Paczki to a whole 'nother level of delicious-ness. This year's flavors are:

traditional plum

raspberry

apricot

cherry

custard

plain (yes, without filling. Amadeus has had requests for plain, and they are obliging.)

Pre-order ASAP — in pick up the phone and call now this morning — as quantities are limited by their ability to make them.

Hamtramck-Style Paczki from CopernicusAnd as before, Copernicus is bringing in excellent Paczki by the truckload from Hamtramck. If you want a lot, you'll need to order in advance, but if you just want a few paczki, or a lone paczek, you can walk in. Their flavors this year are:

These are two different styles of paczki which are both great in their own way. Why not support local business — and Paczki Day — and get some from both places so you can have a paczki taste test? (Okay, your cardiologist may object, but you only live once...)

I like nothing more than a bar of good dark chocolate. I can be perfectly happy with a single square (or perhaps two squares) a day, savored after a long day at work. Joe brought home a number of interesting bars lately...

Dark chocolate with cherry notes. Very smooth. Nice and easy on the tongue. Definitely an approachable dark chocolate for someone who is looking to push past the 60% cacao level. The Mora Mora bar took a silver medal at the World Chocolate Awards in 2006.SambrianoOrigin: Madagascar75% cacao

A serious dark chocolate for serious dark chocolate lovers. I thought it had an earthy, almost slightly smoky, flavor, whereas Joe detected a faint burnt caramel edge to it. I really really liked this one and will be looking to buy it again.Michel Cluizel Noir au Grué de CacaoOrigin: Santo Domingo60% cacao minimum

Deep dark chocolate flavor with cacao nibs embedded in the bar. It tastes darker than its 60% would suggest, probably primarily due to the unsweetened crunchy nibs. I think the nibs also give it a bit of a chalky texture. (But then, nibs are a bit chalky.) I generally like Michel Cluizel chocolate bars, and I love nibs, so this is a nice addition to their collection.

My friends know that I really, really dislike milk chocolate. Semi-sweet chocolate chips are fine in cookies. But plain milk chocolate for eating? Not for me. But Joe said that I had to try this one. I had some doubts -- one, it's milk chocolate and two, I'm not a big fan of Vosges -- but then he said the magic words, "it has sea salt" and I was intrigued. Would the sea salt would balance the too-sweet chocolate?

Yes. Yes, it does. The Barcelona Bar is a fabulous mix of salt and chocolate and almond, with the salt contrasting nicely against the chocolate. I liked the salt so much that I started sprinkling more sea salt on pieces of Barcelona bar. This is a bar I'd definitely buy again, and that's saying something given that it's a mere 41%.

Mo's Bacon BarMmmmmm.... bacon! This bar features applewood smoked bacon, alderwood smoked salt, and more of that "deep milk chocolate" (41%). It's really good; you wouldn't normally think of combining bacon and chocolate (well, normal people wouldn't) but it works surprisingly well. The bacon is rich and salty, and also brings a nice umami touch of its own. If we'd had this bar on its own, or alongside more conventional chocolate bars, I think we'd be raving about it. But we had it alongside the Barcelona bar, and it paled by comparison because they're doing some of the same kinds of things and the Barcelona bar is doing them better.

Don't let that stop you, though, because it's worth trying in its own right. Just don't do it as part of a tasting flight with the Barcelona or something.

I'm not obsessed or anything (Honest! I can quit any time!) but whenever I travel to places where honey is made and sold, I can't resist stopping for some local honey. I went to the North Market in Columbus and came home with a jar of honey. I went to Tennessee to visit relatives some years back, and came home with a jar of sourwood honey (and an embarrassing addiction to roadside boiled peanuts, but that's another story). However, Southeast Michiganders don't have to go far to find small production, raw honey. Michigan is the 9th-ranked honey producing state in the US (there are even beekeepers in the U.P., but they have to use reinforced electric fences to keep the bears out — apparently, the stereotypes about bears and honey are true).

A week ago, we attended the Dancing Crane Honey Farm open house at the Ann Arbor home of husband-and-wife owners Dr. John Piette and Joanne Kimata. John grew up helping his Uncle Joe in Wisconsin keep bees. In 2003, he and Joanne founded Dancing Crane. Their bees feast on clover, goldenrod, and wildflower nectar just outside of Ann Arbor on an organic farm and also in the field of a retired couple who were farmers and raised horses. Their honey is raw, unfiltered, and cold-processed. It's been sold to customers on every continent except Australia and Antarctica (so far), but if you live in Ann Arbor you can go pick it up yourselves and save on shipping. And it's really, really good...

John and Joanne's son Jordan explaining how bees build honeycomb on the frames. Each frame already has a honeycomb pattern on it; the bees then extend the comb out from there. If they didn't have the patterns, they'd still build the characteristic hexagonal-grid combs, they'd just build them wherever they felt like it. This is a family activity and the kids know their stuff.

The house was packed with friends and customers. Beekeeping paraphernalia was displayed around the living room. We were drawn immediately to the large dining room table covered with jars of Dancing Crane Honey. Among other things, they had a taste test pitting honey from Dancing Crane (as well as two other SE Michigan-made raw honeys) against a jar of generic Grade A grocery store honey.

It's a very effective demonstration. I went through the samples from left to right as advised by the instructions and without looking at the brand names. Let me say: the taste difference between raw honey and generic pasteurized grocery store honey is immediately obvious. Each of the local raw honeys was full of different floral flavors, beautiful on the tongue, and a pleasure to eat plain or on a cracker. (We did like Dancing Crane's best, but we liked all of them.) By comparison, the grocery store honey I grew up with is insipid and boring. I'm convinced, and I think you will be too if you try it.

Another interesting thing they had was an array of research articles investigating the potential health benefits and
medical uses of honey. Both Piette and Kimata work in health care;
Piette is a health services researcher. They made a point of supplying an
unbiased selection of articles, which we skimmed but don't feel qualified to summarize. For now, let's just
say that the evidence suggests that honey is useful in at least some
contexts, and I'll see if they'd be willing to compile or point us
toward a summary for a future writeup here. One warning, though — while raw honey is a wonderful thing for most, it is not suitable for people who are very young, very old, or have compromised immune systems. (In the meantime, you can find more information about honey and health here.)

Dancing Crane Honey is an all-volunteer farm (they welcome volunteers to help them at the hives as well as during the annual honey harvest), and all revenue beyond operating expenses goes to selected charities. Their honey sells for $7.50 for a one-pound jar, or $20 for three. This year's charities are VNHelp and The Degenhardt Foundation. Past charities include Doctors Without Borders, and Heifer International. They still have honey left this year, but it's going fast. My recommendation: try some. You'll never go back to the generic stuff.